Introduction
Naomi Klein, who is often taken to be a radical leftist, published an article which was
a speech … at an event organized by Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition in defence of activists arrested by Toronto police for putting up posters at an Indigo bookstore.
In the article, she outlines why Indigo was the target, and she addresses at one point directly Heather Reisman, CEO of Indigo (see https://breachmedia.ca/naomi-klein-calls-on-heather-reisman-drop-charges-indigo-11/), appealing to Reisman “for the charges to be dropped.” Whether this is a tongue-in-cheek demand (not expecting Reisman to actually do so) or whether Klein actually believes that appealing to Reisman will result in Reisman calling for the charges to be dropped is neither here nor there since there is no evidence to determine the matter. I will leave this possible contradiction of a radical leftist appealing to the goodwill of a capitalist aside. I would like to focus on another possible contradiction expressed in Klein’s speech.
Reisman, as the article indicates,
found the Herseg Foundation for Lone Soliders, which provides millions of dollars of support every year to non-Israeli Jews who volunteered to join the Israeli military (and to some Israeli soldiers as well). The foundation, co-founded with Gerry Schwartz, provides scholarships, a living wage, and all kinds of perks as a reward for military service with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Klein points out
Heseg’s two decades of financial contributions are no different: they are an important part of Israel’s ability to recruit soldiers from overseas. In fact, Heseg is listed as the first source of scholarships on the “Draft IDF” website.
The trouble, of course, is that the IDF has committed many documented war crimes and the occupation it is tasked with enforcing is itself illegal under international law, according to a recent United Nations Commission of Inquiry. In short, Heseg is no ordinary charity. I’ll quote a letter sent to Heather Reisman by the President of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East: “You are encouraging foreign soldiers to join the Israeli Army, and participate in an Army which daily commits violations of humanitarian and human rights law” [my emphases].
That was written in 2010. In the 13 years since, the violations have only grown more alarming, and never more so than in Gaza over the past seven weeks. Which brings us to the contentious words on the poster over Heather Reisman’s face: “Funding Genocide.”
Let’s review: the indiscriminate killing of civilians, a staggering number of them children; the severing of food, water and medication; the attacks on civilian infrastructure including hospitals; the mass forced expulsions from Northern Gaza; the declarations of intent to ethnically cleanse Palestinians made by Israeli politicians. These are the facts that have led multiple UN experts to describe the situation in Gaza as a “genocide in the making,” stating clearly that “such egregious violations cannot be justified in the name of self-defence after attacks by Hamas on Oct. 7, which we have condemned in the strongest possible terms.” Hundreds of scholars have similarly warned of a “potential genocide” under the 1948 international convention.
Since the words “funding genocide” have, in an Orwellian twist, been cast as “hate speech,” it’s important for us to understand that the warnings and allegations of genocide are very far from marginal. Articles by experts debating the point have appeared in The New York Times and many other leading publications. The Centre for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit against the Biden Administration alleging “failure to prevent genocide.”
You do not have to agree that the genocide charge is correct to recognize that the accusation has been made and will continue to be made in the months and years to come. The poster referenced these facts. It said nothing about Jews. Nothing about identity. Used no hate symbols.
Decontextualization of Human Abuses
I found Klein’s uncritical references to international law and humanitarian and human rights law surprising. Here is what she wrote in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2008), about Amnesty International and human rights, pages 119-120 (all of what follows is drawn from previous posts on this blog):
The narrow scope is most problematic in Amnesty International’s 1976 report on Argentina, a breakthrough account of the junta’s atrocities and worthy of its Nobel Prize. Yet for all its thoroughness, the report sheds no light on why the abuses were occurring. It asks the question “to what extent are the violations explicable or necessary” to establish “security”—which was the junta’s official rationale for the “dirty war.”14 After the evidence was examined, the report concludes that the threat posed by left-wing guerrillas was in no way commensurate with the level of repression used by the state.
But was there some other goal that made the violence “explicable or necessary”? Amnesty made no mention of it. In fact, in its ninety-two-page report, it made no mention that the junta was in the process of remaking the country along radically capitalist lines. It offered no comment on the deepening poverty or the dramatic reversal of programs to redistribute wealth, though these were the policy centerpieces of junta rule. It carefully lists all the junta laws and decrees that violated civil liberties but named none of the economic decrees that lowered wages and increased prices, thereby violating the right to food and shelter—also enshrined in the UN charter. If the junta’s revolutionary economic project had been even superficially examined, it would have been clear why such extraordinary repression was necessary, just as it would have explained why so many of Amnesty’s prisoners of conscience were peaceful trade unionists and social workers.
In another major omission, Amnesty presented the conflict as one restricted to the local military and the left-wing extremists. No other players are mentioned —not the U.S. government or the CIA; not local landowners; not multinational corporations. Without an examination of the larger plan to impose “pure” capitalism on Latin America, and the powerful interests behind that project, the acts of sadism documented in the report made no sense at all —they were just random, free-floating bad events, drifting in the political ether, to be condemned by all people of conscience but impossible to understand.
This suppression of social context is characteristic of the social-democratic or social-reformist left in general. This suppression assumed an internal form–self-suppression of criticisms of government and the class of employers because of internal repression (and such self-repression is understandable), but it is no excuse for suppressing it internationally. From pages 120-121:
Every facet of the human rights movement was functioning under highly restricted circumstances, though for different reasons. Inside the affected countries, the first people to call attention to the terror were friends and relatives of the victims, but there were severe limits on what they could say. They didn’t talk about the political or economic agendas behind the disappearances because to do so was to risk being disappeared themselves. The most famous human rights activists to emerge under these dangerous circumstances were the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, known in Argentina as the Madres. At their weekly demonstrations outside the house of government in Buenos Aires, the Madres did not dare hold up protest signs —instead they clasped photographs of their missing children with the caption “Donde estan?” Where are they? In the place of chants, they circled silently, wearing white headscarves embroidered with their children’s names. Many of the Madres had strong political beliefs, but they were careful to present themselves as nothing more threatening to the regime than grieving mothers, desperate to know where their innocent children had been taken.*
* After the end of dictatorship, the Madres became some of the fiercest critics of the new
economic order in Argentina, as they still are today.In Chile, the largest of the human rights groups was the Peace Committee, formed by opposition politicians, lawyers and Church leaders. These were lifelong political activists who knew that the attempt to stop torture and to free political prisoners was only one front in a much broader battle over who would have control of Chile’s wealth. But in order to avoid becoming the regime’s next victims, they dropped their usual old-left denunciations of the bourgeoisie and learned the new language of “universal human rights.” Scrubbed clean of references to the rich and the poor, the weak and strong, the North and the South, this way of explaining the world, so popular in North America and Europe, simply asserted that everyone has the right to a fair trial and to be free from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. It didn’t ask why, it just asserted that In the mixture of legalese and human interest that characterizes the human rights lexicon, they learned that their imprisoned companeros were actually prisoners of conscience whose right to freedom of thought and speech, protected under articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, had been violated.
For those living under dictatorship, the new language was essentially a code; just as musicians hid the political messages in their lyrics in sly metaphors, they were disguising their leftism in legalese—a way of engaging in politics without mentioning politics.*
*Note: Even with these precautions, human rights activists were not safe from the terror. Chile’s jails were filled with human rights lawyers, and in Argentina the junta sent one of its top torturers to infiltrate the Madres, posing as a grieving relative. In December 1977, the group was raided; twelve mothers were permanently disappeared, including the leader of the Madres, Azucena de Vicenti, along with two French nuns.
When I first went to Guatemala in 1980, it became evident that public discussion of anything political was dangerous. For example, when I started to discuss the political situation in Guatemala, one man in the plaza (town square) in Quetzaltenango (the second largest city in Guatemala) indicated that he would not discuss such things “here.”
Yes, AI and the human rights movement and international law may do some good–but simultaneously, by excluding the social context, they do harm.
They also do harm by uncritically accepting the law as a standard that workers, citizens, immigrants and migrant workers should accept. For socialists, though, why should we indulge in respect for the law? The law may protect us in some circumstances, but the law in general reinforces existing property relations, including the exploitation and oppression of billions of workers. Klein seems little concerned about the long-term political implications of her uncritical use of international law and the idea of human rights for a struggle for a socialist society–just like much of the left these days, it seems.
A Problem with Referring to International Law to Justify Opposing Israel’s Genocidal Actions: Strategy and Tactics
Many leftists, like Klein, do not even bother worrying about references to international law in order to defend Palestinians against the Israeli government’s genocidal actions. After all, should we not use all means at our disposal to defend the Palestinians?
Such a view is short-sighted and has little to do with the pursuit of a socialist strategy. Indeed, the left here in Toronto and elsewhere frequently collapse strategy and tactics, in effect advocating only tactics. This leads nowhere except the perpetuation of the problems and the constant need to resist and to struggle—without any realistic hope of resolving the conditions which constantly generate the problem. This does not mean that reforms should be thrown out of the window. It does mean, however, that activism that stays at the level of tactics will never address the more profound causes of the immediate problems.
Robert Knox (2012) addresses this problem in his article titled “Strategy and Tactics.” in pages 193-229, The Finnish Yearbook of International Law, Volume 21, writes, p. 205:
…only tactical interventions occur, which are then branded as strategic interventions, foreclosing the possibility of an actual strategic intervention.
What is the difference between strategic interventions and tactical interventions? The difference has been specified in terms of war as follows (pages 197-198):
Carl von Clausewitz, one of the most influential exponents of modern military theory, defined strategy as:
[T]he use of the engagement to attain the object of the war … It must therefore give an aim to the whole military action. Its aim must be in accord with the object of the war. In other words, strategy develops the plan of the war, and to the aforesaid aim links the series of acts which are to lead to it; that is, it plans the separate campaigns and arranges the engagements to be fought in each of them.
Strategy is – in essence – how it is that one would fight and win a war: connecting the various individual battles together so as to achieve this broader objective. In contradistinction to this is tactics, which is concerned with smaller and shorter term matters. Tactics are concerned with how to win the individual battles and engagements of which the war is composed.
If we wish to translate this metaphor into more general terms, we might say that strategy concerns the manner in which we achieve and eventually fulfil our long term aims or objectives, whereas tactics concerns the methods through which we achieve our shorter term aims or objectives. The obvious conclusion here, and one that will be important to bear in mind throughout this article, is that when we talk of ‘pragmatism’ or ‘effectiveness’ it need not be referring to only the immediate situation. As will be explored more fully below, any tactical intervention will also have strategic consequences. This means that when thinking about effectiveness, it is necessary to understand the inherent relation between strategy and tactics. In so doing, the distinction allows us to consider how effective particular (seemingly ‘short term’) interventions might be in the longer term.
The Content of International Law May, in Some Circumstances, Be Usefully Used
How does the issue strategy and tactics relate to international law? We can, under some circumstances, use the international law in terms of its content, but we also need to make clear that this use is due to the exceptional circumstances and that international law in terms of its form not only limits what can be achieved but can easily reinforce the political and economic structures of power.
China Mieville, in his book Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, emphasises that the law, because of its formal nature of theoretically treating everyone as a legal, isolated subject with, in general, equal rights that are enforceable if one of the parties decides to breach the formal rights of others, has as one of its background conditions the use of force or coercion to ensure that such rights are respected. Law, rights and obligations thus necessarily involve some form of coercive agent to enforce the law, rights and obligations.
But what happens when the so-called equal legal subjects formally are in fact unequal in terms of their actual social and material power?
Robert Knox (2009), in his article “Marxism, International Law, and Political Strategy,” in pages 413-436, Leiden Journal of International Law, Volume 22 (2009), page 417, addresses this issue:
In order to resolve this question Mieville analyses the relationship between law and coercion… although it posits individuals as formally equal, these individuals have radically opposed interests. These opposed interests can only be resolved through violence, which means that the possibility of violent resolution is inherent. … Once it is acknowledged that international law has a deep structural connection withv iolence, the solution …
is that – in Marx’s words (from which Mieville takes the title of his book) – ‘between
equal rights force decides’.
Mieville, however, according to Knox, limits his definition of coercion to military coercion. He also assumes that the only actors on the international stage are nations. Knox argues against both assumptions.
There is force through arms–military coercion at the international level and police coercion at the national level (although the military may of course be used internally as well). However, Knox also points out that there is economic coercion and ideological coercion. International actors may also be organized workers across borders and not just nation-states or governments. Page 428:
First, progressive forces often wield a great deal of economic power internal to the bourgeois state (and internationally). It is possible to imagine a situation in which a pattern of economic ‘sabotage’, strikes, and so on by these actors could force a state to adopt a particular ‘interpretation’ of the law.
Forcing governments or nation-states to act in such a way that they appear to be acting legitimately could also be conceived as ideological force or coercion. Page 428:
Second, there is the argument that a concern with legitimacy and consistency might be manifested on the part of those interpreting the law. This position is perhaps best exemplified with the oft-quoted position advocated by E. P. Thompson in his Whigs and Hunters:
If the law is evidently partial and unjust, then it will mask nothing, legitimise nothing,
contribute nothing to any class’s hegemony. The essential precondition for the effectiveness of law, in its function as ideology, is that it shall display an independence from gross manipulation and shall seem to be just.… Thus it may be that a particular interpretation of the law will not be taken, because it obviously favours a particular class interest, or is inconsistent with a stated ideological justification for a given course of action. It may be that in instances where such an interpretation is put forward, progressive social forces are able to seize on such inconsistency andmount an immanent critique of the interpretation. In response to such action, or in order to avoid it, forcemay ‘decide’ in a manner consistent with the wishes of progressive forces.
The Dangers of the Form of International Law for the Radical Left
The above characterization of the possibility of using international law for socialist ends needs to be severely qualified when we consider the form of law, including international law. The form of law itself influences the content of law, or what it is. Law is both too abstract and too specific. In relation to being too abstract, Knox has this to say. Page 430:
The problems with which progressives are confronted – poverty, war, disease – do not simply just ‘happen’, they are manifestations of ‘background’, structural factors – be they political, economic, or ideological; ‘“moment[s]” in a larger structure of meaning that can be known, analyzed, and potentially defeated’. But legal argument is both too abstract and at the same time too specific to deal effectively with these problems. Legal argument frames its participants as abstract, self-contained individuals; as such it treats their actions, rather than the reasons for these actions, as decisive. Moreover, these actions become relevant only inasmuch as they form the content of a dispute or violation of the law. Legal argument therefore resolves the particular disputes of abstract individuals without ever touching on the logics which shape and condition their actions, and in this sense it is too abstract.
Law is also too specific in that its form of resolving problems often limits its applicability to very specific disputes. Page 430-431:
Although legal argument may be able to deal with effects, it proves incapable of dealing with causes; this is where legal argument proves too specific. Legal argument resolves specific ‘violations’, ‘disputes’, or ‘instances’, but it never questions the general structural logics that lurk beneath them, and so cannot fully eradicate the problems it addresses. This is not to say that those who adopt legal argument are unaware of the systemic logics that underlie particular actions, simply that in adopting a legal strategy they act as if they were unaware of such logics and so cannot address them.
By Way of Conclusion: What Is To Be Done?
Knox proposes a solution to this problem of the possible incorporation of struggles around international law in terms of content into the legal form, thereby limiting such struggles to the existing economic, political and social structures rather than going beyond them: principled opportunism. Page 433:
3.1.1. Conclusion: principled opportunism
The above analysis suggests a two-pronged strategy for the progressive use of international law. Thec ontent of international law is contestable byprogressive non-state
actors. Utilizing their economic, ideological, and sometimes coercive power these
groupsmay be able to turn the content of international law to their own ends, either
by constituting themselves as formal actors in the international sphere or by forcing
particular states to adopt an interpretation that favours their interests. …However, the transformative power of this struggle is limited by the legal form. By virtue of the ‘shape’ of this form, legal strategy cannot address the social structures that give rise to the world’s problems. This indicates that the best route for international lawyers is to engage in ‘concrete forms of political commitment’, abandoning any utopian hopes of the law’s role in social transformation. International law might be used ‘defensively’ – perhaps invoking it in a national trial to defend otherwise criminal actions. Equally, it could be used offensively, for example in attempting to secure the trial of war criminals, which would also help to publicize the ‘truth’ of a particular situation.
Knox warns that there are risks of such a strategy, and radical leftists need to be aware of them. Page 433:
Even with such amodest strategy there are real risks. The shape of the legal form means that pursuing a legal strategy can break up collective solidarity, and renders progressive forces unable to address the systemic causes of social problems. Indeed, to mount a legal strategy is to risk legitimating the structures of global capitalism. Thus what needs to be articulated is a strategy which is able to take advantage of the possible progressive content of the law, whilst avoiding the problems of the legal form. International law, then, must never be pursued because it ‘is law’, but only insofar as its content can advance the aims of progressive constituencies. What must be pursued is a ‘principled opportunism’, where – in order to undercut the individualizing, legitimating perspective of law – international law is consciously used as amere tool, to be discarded when not useful. …
The strategic question of international law’s progressive potential is – as a matter of
principle – reduced to the tactical, instrumental deployment of legal argument.
Principled opportunism may, under specific conditions, give way to a greater focus and importance to law and legal argument, but unlike the idealization of international law characteristic of social democrats and social reformists (including, in this instance, Klein), principled opportunism should be the default line for radical leftists. Page 435:
Of course, this brings with it its own problems, as, rather than consciously avoiding the legal character of a demand, it seeks to embrace it. What this suggests is a two-track strategy, where in normal circumstances ‘principled opportunism’ is pursued but in extraordinary circumstances ‘legality’ once again becomes important. Even in these extraordinary circumstances there would always be a ‘conscious’ element, those who have engaged in principled opportunism, who remain ‘aware’ of the limits of legality.
Were not the protesters arrested? Does not an arrest assume a legal framework? Does this legal framework, among other things, protect Reisman’s property? Why not question her right to own Indigo? Why not inquire into the exploitation of workers at Indigo? Why not inquire into their oppression? The issue goes far beyond the arrest of a given set of individuals or even the current genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, and yet Klein fails to connect the issue to the wider issue of property relations and the legal framework that protects the specific kind of property relations that enables a minority to use their property to control, exploit and oppress others–and to influence, through their specific form of wealth, the political, social and cultural lives of billions of people throughout this world.
Why are not socialists trying to link this issue to the wider issue of the creation of a socialist world, where workers are no longer exploited, controlled and oppressed?
The Abolitionary 